Best High Tide In Tucson : Essays From Now Or Never Quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

"If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can."

"I’ve also learned to give him a continually changing assortment of seashells, which he tries on and casts off like Cinderella’s stepsisters preening for the ball."

"Life being what it is, we’d eventually quit prodding our sick friend to cheer up, and would move on to the next stage of a difficult friendship: neglect."

"Luna moths, Arctic loons, and lunatics have a sole inspiration in common."

"I’ve come to love the desert that bristles and breathes and sleeps outside my windows."

"I sometimes ache to be rocked in the bosom of the blood relations and busybodies of my childhood."

"The way I stock my refrigerator would amuse a level-headed interplanetary observer."

"At recognizing insider/outsider status, for example, starting with white vs. black and grading straight into distinctions so fine as to baffle the bystander—Serb and Bosnian, Hutu and Tutsi, Crip and Blood."

"The wonder of it is that our culture attaches almost unequivocal shame to our animal nature, believing brute urges must be hurtful, violent things."

"Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky."

"We had a dishwasher, but my mother insisted you had to scrub and rinse every dish before you loaded it in."

"Cleaning my house, in the nineties, takes a lick and a promise."

"Once in a blue moon my daughter’s ballet tights will shrink and the forks won’t entirely come clean; I donate them to the hand-me-down bag and run them through again, respectively."

"In these matters, it seems to me, an ounce of cure is worth a lifetime of prevention."

"For the first time in history, through every means possible, housework was elevated from humble necessity to career status."

"Cleanliness is next to godliness only if you’re God’s Wife."

"Guiding and nourishing a flock of the very young—your own or someone else’s—is a career, there’s no doubt about it."

"I’m embarrassed about my own selfish participation in that experiment."

"Sometimes, when I’m trapped and have to listen to such stuff, I hear men of an evangelical bent explain that all our problems would end if women would just tend to housework and children as they have for two thousand years."

"We’ve spent far more time together making kites and forts and scientifically mounted bug collections than working on hospital corners, and if her bed doesn’t even get made, I’m the last to notice."

"Housework, like the Buddha, takes many forms, depending on what is in your heart as you approach it."

"The minute my daughter is on the school bus, he saunters up behind me with a bat slung over his shoulder and says oh so directly, 'Okay, author lady, you’ve got six hours till that bus rolls back up the drive. You can sit down and write, now, or you can think about looking for a day job.'"

"When I first saw Africa I thought it was a cloud."

"Strength just comes in one brand—you stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combed."

"A family so large and varied would not easily be brought down by a single blow: it could absorb a death, long illness, an abandonment here or there, and any number of irreconcilable differences."

"Every single appliance under my roof that involved water—the washing machine, hot-water heater, bathtub, sink, shower, washing machine again—chose to blow out and cause a flood on its own special day of that long winter."

"This is adventure’s opposite: traipsing through a hall of mirrors, listening to myself talk."

"I’d better open the closet door and invite my other selves to the table, even if it looks undignified or flaky."

"A magnificent literary tool is the dramatic point of view; one of its great virtuosos was John Steinbeck."

"To get one job done right, let alone seven or eight. And certainly we are supposed to get it right."

"What they need is a seven-word answer, and the only accurate one I can think of is: ‘It’s about three hundred pages long—read it!!’"

"If I could say my piece in a glib sentence or two, why on earth would I have spent years of my life on it, and all those pages?"

"Possibly this is what’s regarded as midlife crisis, but I’m not looking for a new me, just owning up to all the old ones."

"How is a child to find the way to her own beliefs, unless she can stuff her pockets with all the truths she can find—whether she finds them on a library shelf or in a friend’s warm, strange-smelling kitchen."

"All I have to do is give a reading in the morning, then catch a flight home."

"A great many people will live out their days without ever seeing such sights, or if they do, never gasping. My parents taught me this—to gasp, and feel lucky."

"The day I captured and brought home a giant, luminescent green luna moth, they carried on as if it were the Hope diamond I’d discovered hanging on a shred of hickory bark."

"Someone in my childhood gave me the impression that fiddleheads and mourning cloaks were rare and precious."

"I recognize, exactly, Camille’s wide-eyed thrill when we discover a trail of deer tracks in the soft mud among bird-foot violets."

"The hay fields beyond these woods, the hawk circling against a mackerel sky, the voices of frogs, the smells of mud and leaf mold, these things place me square in the middle of all my childhood memories."

"I suppose no one ever taught them how to strike it rich in the forest. But I know."

"In the heat of my bedroom they hatched almost immediately, and I proudly took my legion of tiny caterpillars to school."

"I would say that our love for our natural home has to go beyond finite, into the boundless—like the love of a mother for her children, whose devotion extends to both the gifted and the scarred among her brood."

"We gasp over the young, golden coyotes who come down to our pond for a drink."

"Domesticated though they are, I want the desert boundary lands of southern Arizona to remain intact. I believe in their remnant wildness."
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"How impatient, how rampant, how precocious these osiers."

"In his observations of plant communities he touched on succession, allelopathy, and other concepts that would not have names until the birth of the science of ecology in the next century."

"They have hardly made two shoots from the sand in as many springs, when silvery catkins burst out along them, and anon golden blossoms and downy seeds, spreading their race with incredible rapidity."

"He admired the trees for their ingenuity, and praised the wind that catches their seeds for its unfailing providence."

"If they blow off all the seeds at one puff, which they rarely do, then they are not wanted."

"As I made my leisurely way through Thoreau’s final book I found myself turning down the corner of nearly every other page to note an arresting moment of prose."

"A squirrel goes a-chestnutting perhaps as far as the boys do, and when he gets there he does not have to shake or club the tree, or wait for frost to open the burrs, but he walks up to the burrs and cuts them off and strews the ground with them before they have opened."

"Consider what a vast work these forest planters are doing! So far as our noblest hardwood forests are concerned, the animals, especially squirrels and jays, are our greatest and almost only benefactors."

"We should be more civilized as well as humane if we recognized once a year by some symbolical ceremony the part which the squirrel plays in the economy of Nature."

"Like cartoon characters, we seem to be running full tilt through the air beyond the edge of the cliff with our minds on something else."